Where Should You Spend Your Digital Marketing Budget?

It goes without saying that a digital marketing strategy is crucial to support your business’ growth. New companies, however, sometimes struggle to decide where to allocate the budget for these efforts. There are several marketing tools available that can help but it can be difficult to find the one that’s the right fit for your business.

The golden rule here is to invest in the tools that will help your company grow, but before you start spending it is important to assess your current situation and measure your performance so far. Which tools are you using, how much are you spending on them, and how much are you getting out from your efforts? If something worked or didn’t work, ask yourself: why? Remember: it is very hard to optimise what you cannot measure.

Once you get this right it will be easier to determine which tools work best for your business and how much you should be spending on each one of them. At this stage, you should be allocating money based on their success rate rather than their cost.

When you have an inbound marketing approach, your customer is at the centre of it so the more personalised your efforts are the greater are the chances you will reach your goals. Getting a full assessment of your current strategy will also help you in identifying your core audience and its behaviour, something that can also be handy when considering where to spend your budget.

If you are a business that’s just starting out and don’t have the benefit of comparing historical data, you can turn to testing tools to see which ones you can take the most out of. More often than you think it’s more about how you use what you have at your disposal rather than how much you have to spend.

One thing you should consider investing in is a good Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) that will help you get the metrics you need to measure performance. There is a vast selection you can choose from depending on what your business does and what you want to achieve. If you are a bit low on cash, a good way of testing marketing tools is to sign up for free trials or getting the paid version at the lowest price point. If the tool isn’t right for you, don’t waste time and just move on to the next one.

Content marketing is another area that you should be paying attention to. Not only will it help your company with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) –another thing that should be a part of your digital marketing strategy– but also with branding. It can help you to position yourself as an expert in your field of work and, with the right words, will be crucial to improving your ranking on Google. I would recommend starting with blog posts on your own website –you can try two posts per week and adjust as you measure results. Another advantage of content marketing is that it is also versatile and it can be repurposed to other platforms, such as your social media channels. Not convinced yet? While content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, it generates more than three times as many leads.

As mentioned above, content marketing goes hand in hand with SEO. If you want your content to stand out and reach as many people as possible, it is worth investing in an SEO strategy with high-value back links. When you get this right, you can move on to experiment with social media and see which platform will serve your business best. If you have an extra budget it might be worth checking the options available with influencer marketing, an area that is expensive to invest but that has been showing a lot of return to companies willing to take a chance on it.

Investing in these areas should be a good starting point for your strategy that can be expanded and re-adapted as you go along. One thing you should always keep in mind is to not be afraid and test what works best for your company because even when you fail there are a lot of lessons you can learn from it to help your business thrive.

About Arpit

Arpit leads the Marketing Team at Jobbio, working to identify growth opportunities for the company as well as checking how campaigns are performing and where they can be optimised. Prior to Jobbio, Arpit has worked for world-renowned companies such as LG, Deloitte, BT, Nokia and Skype, where he was responsible for running global marketing campaigns focusing on brand, acquisition and analytics. During his time at Skype, he grew the monthly user base from 280M to 375M and launched global partnerships with brands like Amazon, China Unicom, Airtel and Samsung. At Nokia, he was part of the team that launched the world’s first Windows phone. Most recently, at Wooga Games, he launched its first-ever brand campaign working with social influencers, which was shortlisted for the Shorty Awards. In his spare time, he is a mentor for graduates at the University of Cambridge.

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